Moving On
by eirabach
Summary: The Doctor may have thought that humanity would lead to happily ever after, but the whole human race knows it's never that simple. 10/Rose and a dollop of Jackie. Post-'Journey's End'. Now with proper formatting. Sigh.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: The first bit of fanfic I've written since my Harry Potter obsessed youth, and the first thing I've ever written in the present tense. Also totally unbetaed, so please be a little forgiving! I know everybody and their mother has written a post-'Journey's End' fic of some description, but I just couldn't help myself, you know? It's like 10/Rose shipper threapy on the cheap.  
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**Disclaimer: I claim no ownership whatsoever of the Doctor Who world or characters and am making no money from this in any way shape or form. That's the BBC's pleasure.  
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Jackie sort of bounces from one end of the dining room to the other, duster in hand, humming along to a tune on the radio that she'd would never have enjoyed back in the other universe, but still with one ear listening for Tony while he naps. She likes doing her own housework now that she knows she doesn't have to, and feels the warmth of satisfaction whenever she stands back to look at what she's achieved. She misses Mickey and frets about Rose and Pete, out there defending the Earth, but at her very core she is happy.

That's why the Doctor likes watching her so much.

She talks about anything and everything; balls and parties and politics and all sorts of things that he'd never thought Jackie Tyler would have the remotest interest in, and when he brings it up with her she laughs and reminds him that the old Jackie Tyler never had to entertain the President at her dinner parties. He likes the way she can differentiate between new Jackie, who has money and Pete and little Tony, and old Jackie, who only had Rose, and only until he took her away. It's that struggle to reconcile the past and the present – the future – that brings him to sit with her when she's dusting or hovering. He loves the fact that she treats him just the same as she ever did.

"You're in my way," she hisses as she tries to reach round him to dust the top of a picture frame – this one's Pete with Tony on his shoulders – and she tuts her disapproval when he perches on the edge of the dining table. Waving her duster like a weapon she starts on one of her rants, usually along the lines that if he thinks he can sit around making her house look untidy he can go whistle, and the Doctor prepares to let it wash over him as he so often does. He never thought Jackie Tyler yelling at him would become a comfort.

"We're not keeping you, you know," she begins, and it's dissimilar enough to the start he's used to that the casual smirk he puts on for their sparring fits slips.

"I should think not," he says in his haughtiest manner, "I've seen what happens to your pets Jackie Tyler."

Rosie-dog growls from behind him.

"No offence," he adds.

"Well," huffs Jackie, rubbing at what must be a very stubborn patch of dust on the mantelpiece, "you're really going to have to think about keeping yourself. Not that we can't afford it, mind," she adds hastily, "and we don't want anything from you for board or anything like that, never charged Rose, it's just, well," she stops scrubbing at the dust to look him in the eye and he's shocked to see tears shining in her eyes, "I'm worried about you. I think you need to feel useful."

He opens and closes his mouth for a moment, the shock of Jackie Tyler worrying about him almost overwhelming his horror.

"I don't need your_ pity_," he spits; his pride, undimmed by the lack of a double heartbeat, rising up in him like bile in his throat, "I don't _need_ anything from you."

"Don't you?" She asks, and it's so gentle - so not like the torrent of abuse he was expecting - that his pride deflates like a popped balloon. She points at the photographs with the end of the duster, and gesticulates towards one in particular, young Pete only just losing his hair, young Jackie smiling up at him bouquet in hand.

"That's me - the other me - the one that died."

She wipes the duster gently over the ornate frame.

"Sometimes, when Pete looks at me, I know that he's still seeing her." Jackie turns to face the Doctor again, and he tries not to be irritated with her all-knowing look, "and you know what, that's never going away, and it's okay."

"Well that's just super," growls the Doctor, unable to hide the little quirks of speech that remind him painfully of Donna, "so far you've insinuated that I'm useless, pitiable and now I'm never going to be good enough. For someone who worries about me you do an absolutely_ brilliant_ job of making me feel like shit."

Jackie sighs one of those sighs that makes even the Doctor feel like a naughty little boy irritating his long-suffering mother.

"That's not what I mean, you daft man."

Her eyes narrow shrewdly, and she vividly reminds the Doctor of a particularly venomous snake going in for the kill, "How's Rose?"

"She's fine," he says, acting for all the world like he can't see what she's getting at, "you saw her off to work this morning. Ham and pickle sandwiches. Getting forgetful in your old age Jacks?"

Her right hand twitches threateningly, but she carries on in the same calm voice, "What was the last thing you said to her?"

The Doctor pretends to think about it, but he knows that Jackie won't be fooled. He and Rose have spoken only a handful of times in the two weeks they've been here, normally pleasantries about the weather, or the dinner, and on that first day when she'd laughed with him about his need for a better suit and more than one t-shirt. He'd thought at that point that maybe everything was going to work out for the best.

He's still waiting.

"I said," he draws the second word out for emphasis, "did you sleep well."

"And what did she say?" Jackie's voice rises; she can smell victory.

"Fine," and he knows that he hasn't managed to keep the bitterness out of his voice, because Jackie's eyes have widened as she realises her success and he decides that as he's in for a penny he's in for a pound, or would be if they existed in this universe.

"But she's not."

Every morning he asks her how she slept, and every morning she says fine. Every morning the circles round her eyes are getting darker. He hates himself for putting them in this position, hates this stupid human body and all the misery it's brought on them both. Hates being trapped in this house watching Jackie Tyler polish photographs of her dead past self because i his /i past is still alive. It's his past that's haunting Rose's exhausted eyes, his own happiness thrown into doubt by the ghost that lingers there, and he'd be much more sympathetic, he really would, if the ghost wasn't himself.

"She's not," agrees Jackie, and then she looks at him like she expects him to come up with the answer.

He shrugs his shoulders, opens his arms wide, and looks to the ceiling for salvation.

"I don't know what to do about it," he says, and Jackie huffs at him and turns her back to continue dusting.

"Maybe," she wafts the dust away from a photo of Rose holding baby Tony, "you should try talking to her. Have a good row. Works for Pete and I all the time."

Tony starts crying somewhere down the corridor and Jackie drops her duster and bustles off to see to him.

The Doctor sits for a while longer; looking at the photos; noticing the places she's missed in her distracted cleaning, and hopes that she's right. He hopes he'll let him live it down if she is.

***

It's getting late, and he's sat with Jackie again, but the atmosphere's changed from earlier. They're in what Jackie lovingly refers to as her 'best' room, Tony playing with toy cars on the carpet, Jackie and the Doctor watching the phone.

It's been three hours since Pete and Rose should have been home.

They can't see anything untoward outside, and the news makes no mention of any alien related disasters, but it's been three hours and they've not had so much as a phone call. Three hours has never been such a long time to him. That's because, he supposes, they're three hours he'll never get back.

Jackie rang Torchwood two and a half hours ago, when she was still full of irritation and prepared to have one of those rows she'd been so keen on earlier, he'd not been worried – at least no more worried than he was every time Rose stepped out of his sight – until he'd heard her breath hitch and seen her drop the phone.

"The line's dead." She'd told him, and her eyes had been so wide, so terrified, that he'd had to look away. They still aren't looking in each other now. The Doctor's never felt so helpless in all his long lives, and finds himself wishing so hard for the TARDIS, for the Screwdriver, for anything that might help, that if wishes were TARDISES he'd have enough for a thousand regenerations.

So many things are impossible now.

Tony's humming a tune to himself, unaware of the tension that surrounds him, and occasionally looks up to give the Doctor a wide smile so familiar that it breaks his single, useless, heart every time he sees it. Tony thinks he's the hero of all the bedtime stories he's ever heard. Tony doesn't care how many hearts he has. He tries very hard not to be bitter that Tony's the only one.

"Where's Daddy?" Tony asks Jackie, and Jackie, to her credit, manages a brave smile and a steady voice when she reassures him that Daddy's just at work, that's all. She's tearing tissues to pieces in her lap, and the Doctor just can't take it anymore.

"I'm going," he says, and Jackie looks up at him in terror.

"Where? You can't leave us here. What if…"

He pulls Jackie to her feet, trying not to notice that his hands are as clammy as hers with the fear, and holds her face in his hands.

"It's a human body, Jackie, but I'm still a Time Lord, still have a Time Lord mind. I know more than anybody in that organisation. Whatever it is that's stopping them…" he takes a deep breath, it's harder not to show fear with this body, "Whatever's out there Jackie. I can help."

Jackie nods once, swiftly, and he drops his hands from her face and bolts for the doorway, grabbing the brown trench-coat she's brought him as a gift and hoping that it brings him luck. Tony calls after him, and he spares him a wave, glad that he's still somebody's hero. Maybe that's all he needs after all, that faith. He heads out the front door, and through all his human fear can't help but grin for the adventure.

It's a pretty brief adventure when he finds them halfway up the drive, but the relief is like something he's never known before.

"Never," he hisses in his best Jackie voice, "_never _do that to me again."

Even though she's wiping blood from her eyes, he's pretty sure he can see her smiling.


	2. Chapter 2

"You're bleeding," he says, stating the obvious as usual, unable to stop himself reaching out to touch her.

It's only a little cut, but that's what bothers him the most; that a little scrape can produce so much gore. It sits above Rose's right eyebrow mocking him as Jackie sponges the drying brown blood from her forehead, her motherly flapping and squealing unable to distract him from the mortal truth when it's staring him in the face. The blood has clumped in Rose's hair, and he wonders if his is the same dull red-brown. He knows it won't be long till he finds out.

He's not thought this through.

Before, with his two hearts and his practical immortality, his life had only been stunted by his own misadventure. He could save the word, save the universe, with an impunity that came from knowing that nothing could really hurt him – make him ugly, perhaps, hopefully just make him ginger – but everything's different now. They could be killed at any moment by a hostile alien or knocked down by a Mini Metro, and there's no guarantee that he'll outlive her. He'll leave her, just like he left all the others, and his heart beats faster from the fear of it.

"Are you okay?" she asks him, voice hushed with real concern, and he almost laughs because she's the one that's bleeding yet she's still fussing about him. He can't quite stop his hands from shaking.

"Oh, fine! Tickety-boo in fact!" He manages a smile not quite as large as the one he was hoping for, but the one she sends back is bright and sunny enough that he wishes he could concentrate on that instead of on the blood-stains on her jacket.

"Good," says Pete, who's watching them in that careful way he has, "because I think it's about time you put yourself to good use. We've two openings on the team now."

Jackie stills in her work, and Rose drops her gaze to the floor. The Doctor doesn't need to be slightly psychic to know that one of those vacancies only opened up tonight.

Pete watches him expectantly, and his earlier conversation with Jackie is ringing in his ears.

It's the closest to his old life he's likely to get, and it's the only guaranteed way to keep a better eye on Rose, but there's a fear there that's never been there before. It's all such a risk now. He _hates _it.

"Count me in," he says, "but I'm not carrying a gun."

_Don't need one_, thinks his guilty conscience, and he looks to Rose for the reassuring smile that he's sure he'll find there.

He's not been human long enough to understand why she's crying.

"You're not going in unarmed," says Pete, rising from his seat like a man with a universe on his back, "I've got to go break the news to one family tonight. I've no intention of breaking it to my own."

The Doctor smiles lopsidedly, and wonders when the idea of a family started to appeal. Part of him balks in horror at the thought, but mostly he just hopes that he never ends up defrosting a freezer.

"Who was it?" Jackie asks, and the smile falls from the Doctor's face as quickly as it appeared.

"Tim," says Pete, and Rose sniffs miserably.

"Oh," Jackie covers her mouth with her hand in a way that would be theatrical if it weren't so heart-felt, "oh Pete. That poor woman – those poor little children…"

"I know," he says, and he leaves, shoulders slumped in an expression of guilt that the Doctor knows all too well.

The Doctor adds Tim to the list of the ghosts he can't replace.

***

"What are you doing?"

He looks up, and smiles at how ridiculously familiar the situation is. She stands over him, pink and yellow with a smile playing on her lips, whilst he tinkers with some bit of machinery, using a mallet more than he should, and any moment now he'll jump up as the TARDIS sings and they'll be off to some new horizon. The memory is so vivid that for a moment he forgets it's not real; that it will never happen again.

"I am inventing," he tells her in his most serious voice, "or rather re-inventing."

"On the floor?" she asks, and there's a teasing note to her voice that he hasn't heard in such a long time that his heart skips a beat.

"I will have you know, Miss Tyler," he says, "that I do all my best work at ground level."

"Oh, do you really?" She says, and her eyes twinkle as she sits cross-legged next to him, "Why's that?"

He's been waiting for her to look at him like that since the beach, but now that she is he finds that his throat has dried up, and he's irritated because he's supposed to be _better_ at this now.

"Oh you know," he says, trying to cover his nervousness with false immodesty, "massive brain me, need all the blood supply I can get."

"Bollocks," says Rose, but she's still smiling at him and that's all he wants in this universe, it's really all he's got. "Let's have a look then."

He's pillaged parts from every storage box in Torchwood, and a few from Jackie's microwave, and he's rather proud of what he's achieved, but he finds himself unaccountably nervous about showing her the result.

"Go on," she cajoles, and he gives in because he really can't deny her anything. She's quiet for a moment, "It's a screwdriver." she says, and he can't quite tell from the tone of her voice if she's happy or sad.

He doesn't know if it's too familiar or not familiar enough.

"That's _sonic_ screwdriver," he says, but his face falls slightly as he looks at it. "Well… it's a bit more of a chisel at the moment."

"Work in progress?" Rose asks, and she's smiling again.

"Isn't everything?" he asks, and her laughter allows him to hope.

One month in and the Doctor's starting to feel a little more comfortable with his feet on the ground, and if he spends his dreams under impossible skies with his impossible ship he tries very hard not to let the others know.

***

He also doesn't let them know that Jackie was right, and that he does feel better for the purpose that Torchwood gives him - no matter how dry and obnoxiously simple most of their problems are to solve. The sonic screwdriver in his pocket is a reminder that a storm is always coming; that adventure isn't too far away. It reminds him of who he is, and for the time being that's just enough to keep him sane.

He's denied all knowledge of what happened to the microwave.

He's been proud, too, of how he's settled into domesticity, and although he hides his fondness for sitting down to dinner with them behind a veneer of baffled irritation he knows that Rose, at least, sees through it. Sometimes she touches his hand under the table and smiles at him knowingly. It's then that he knows they're getting somewhere.

All the same, he thinks this might just be too much for him to cope with.

He's up a ladder that leans precariously against one of the entrance hall walls, drawing pins held in his teeth, helping Pete Tyler hang a banner. It's more domestic than defrosting a freezer; he has to really try not to let on how much he hates it.

"Perfect!" crows Jackie from her position as director, and the Doctor and Pete grunt their appreciation in unison before heading back to ground level. Pete descends sensibly, but the Doctor slides down. He'll take his adrenaline fix where he can get it.

"Oh, look at that!"

He covers his scowl with the best grin he can manage as Rose approaches. She's carrying Tony on her hip and pointing at the banner with her free hand. Tony laughs and claps his approval.

"Happy Third Birthday," she reads, and Tony claps his little hands harder with joy.

Sometimes the Doctor wonders what genetic anomaly causes the children of Pete and Jackie Tyler to see such wonder in everything, but then Rose turns to smile at him with her tongue poking between her teeth, and he's just grateful.

It seems rather excessive to hold a garden party for a child who's barely potty trained, and the guests that are arriving seem rather more interested in the buffet and the bar than the red-headed toddler running between them, but Tony seems happy enough. A few more children turn up, cast off by well-dressed parents as they approach the hosts, and Tony soon latches on to them. The Doctor resolves to keep an eye on him all the same. He doesn't want to think of him as lonely.

"Drink?"

He looks away from where Tony is digging in a sandpit and turns to Rose and the glass she holds out.

"Don't mind if I do," he says, taking it from her. The smell nearly chokes him.

"What- what is it?" he splutters, holding the glass up to the light and squinting at it.

"It's a banana daiquiri," laughs Rose, as she elbows him gently in the side, "but I'd watch out if I were you. Dad's measures tend to be a bit - generous."

"Please, I can handle it," he smirks, and knocks back half the drink in one go. "Ah."

Rose laughs. She sips her drink with a little more decorum.

***

Seventy-two minutes and four of Pete's banana daiquiris later the sounds of the party have faded into the background, and he sits under a tree, eyes only for Rose's flushed face and the cocktail umbrella she twiddles between her fingers.

"Umbrellas," he says in his most serious voice, "are for keeping water off you. Not for putting in drinks. You don't see people floating their umbrellas in puddles and drinking from them, do you?"

"No," says Rose, frowning slightly and bringing the umbrella closer to her face, "'spose not. Not really thought about it before."

She smiles shyly at him from behind a curtain of hair.

"Need you for that; asking the questions too surreal for anyone else to think about."

"You should think about it," he nods his surprisingly heavy head, "think about everything Rose Tyler."

She keeps very quiet for a moment, and then twists round to face him, taking one of his hands in both of hers. He quirks an eyebrow at her, but before he can speak, or even react properly to this, the first really unguarded moment since that kiss so long ago, she's begun to speak.

"Do you think – do you think Doctor that sometimes we might be thinking about things too much?"

He tries to speak, and his mind is racing with all the things that she could mean, but he's betrayed again by his body. He just about manages to lift the other eyebrow.

Pete Tyler will suffer for this.

"I've been thinking about him - ," Rose continues, and he's glad that she seems unable to look him in the face because it means she can't see how utterly gormless he must look, "you – the other you I mean – and thinking is he lonely? Can I live this life with you when he's going to be on his own?"

The Doctor's mouth moves but no words come out. Fortunately, she doesn't seem to expect a reply.

"'Cause you're him, and he's you, and if you love me," he wonders if she realises how beautiful she looks when she's blushing, "then he loves me too. Right?"

He manages to nod an affirmative, utterly unsure as to where she's going with this thought, and well aware that this is probably the worst moment to be struck dumb he could possibly have picked.

"But," she says, finally looking him in the eye, "there's nothing I can do about that. Nothing either of us can do. I've decided," a deep breath, and the Doctor thinks he'll struggle to hear her over the sound of his thundering heart, " – I've decided that there's no point all three of us being lonely. That is, if you'll have me."

It takes him a moment to realise that she expects a reply.

"Rose," he manages, and he can't blame the rawness in his throat on Pete's bar-keeping. She watches him carefully, and he swallows hard in an attempt to dislodge the words he so desperately wants to say.

He thinks of all the sunrises he'll never see again. The sound of the universe still rings in his ears, but he's helpless to answer its call. The turn of the Earth makes him nauseous when he knows he can never escape it.

Every moment he hesitates is a moment that they'll never see again.

Actions, he decides, speak louder than words.

It's a long time before they rejoin the party.


End file.
